
O* S' 
A’ V 


. rL- » «S &> 4 o' , '*-..1 ,..s» . ' •■> « «5 ?> •* . V- 

^ a V *„,*•» . 6 * < *,;. N s ,a q. ^ 0 .v* ^ 

S' r ~y * * ' ,A v i s 4 -7 y, ^ o s c „ -Ty, * * (jA # v 1 J » ^ 

^ v :£mgp* « v / ^° x 




X r -i, ,"-*‘ > s . C*",. 

■S ** , < S A q, 

V ' » 4 s A v i » /, '/-Y 

A^ t * ., O -. 

' * J* y ° 

y --c k\ S d?3 1II/S2- * 


Ife'. ^ V* :/w,-- W 

«W.* k°°- tM?.'. x ++ 

'' ,o° & v- 

■ v,- * fWB*'* *\P A- *"jAVa " ^ < V 5 

:> & “' >S0fe 1 * <& - :: K v ° z ^ V 

c? ^ - ;ifT jkf ° A^ ' r -p. ° 

,V *■ ^ ** ■ er-2' 4 x "WJjir ; 

%> '°* x * ON C,^"' AN' 

- °o C° * c ^ *' ^ ' 

* 


v </> ° % Vf ••••'. .-: * 

'■^J- 7 c5 -1 o' 

O, y 0 , k * ,0 

1 1 * * ^b, . 0 ? c° s 0 * ^ 

o 

\ 0o x 



/ - <* IX 

», ' "o- 

4 v> A V 

t/> \ V 




£ ^ * 


.0 9^ „ 


s. -- 

^0 N 

^ « oA >■ ' ' 

" ‘ * '■ % ^ ;M^ % ^ ' 


' #' 


^ -V, ■ s A ^ - 

3 N C 4 <y, * 4 ' a\ o V I » 4 

^ .A 1 A ^ t 


</• 




•> y 1 '•^ ) V kJ ^ «/> 

r> ^ ^ -A O > x BV v . 

y o« >■ * .' s s a A 

°o 0° .< •'. *- ** J* 4 \v 

A' •*• 

^0 X 

' • X.J./ 4 ,0 q 






^ r 

4 v 0 O 

\ /<• y 7^ 

•.> m' ^ ^% ; W/ / % •. w* 

-•. \'-‘‘/..-..v' '/k-' '♦;v , ‘>^' '-/<'■•' #' 

» ^ '■ Q 

r\* 



41 

° ,nj 5 ^ > ' 

s V * 

...,v*. 

t-A' .*>•:;«;■.V; UJ; 

A^ ° -b 

3 -?• * v. w a# * V y. ■j ' ' , -,Y 

✓ ^*W-3* r k. . ct-^ ts & i A» 


{«¥ « .OCI » ’ . * j -f . ^ V : ‘ • •:< 

>, s d' 

^ -A- / -V^-fkVrf) 

” ,o> ,'• >,, 'b '"° v' *' "'. A ' 1 

.^' ^ a »> vy . a / * 

</' \v • !*,«£« h V «S 

♦y». z V •: » .A ^ 1 aII .- aV C ' 


\ 0o -<. 


Vl ■'^y, 1 * * S A B ' ’ * * 

y ^ a' 

V s 


^ A V 

■\^ V ^ 

O^ - /•'# v c<- * ■'. O' - 

4 0' . <■ .k A t ,, •%. 

c°\‘:r^ a*^ 

f ^'- ^ >* • ' '' 

,0o. 

\ yfk y %- 1V^SS>», A 

y .', V 

r-. f „ o . 

q,. *,. o 3 iV , 

\ N rt > * o 


S *+ 


v - v • frw ; °° x a 1 * 

mm: x°: *:-% a • x = o> *+ ' \, -M/: x°t -k " ;■» < 

•••'*/'.A- * •»•’■/.. * • 1 ' ’ »* k> • - A *•“• v' v * 

A <» ,-^.w?%. „ <?• .v, <* [A >jg )-, n /x * ?'';■■''•• 4 ^Jr, A' * -rO 

^ --, m : ^ ^ . - v ^ \ \ \ $ 

A f ‘p " .£> : 7 




0 N 


c k> x, = 4/ / >M WV J,, t 3 ^b- 

0 • v * o v <? # ' ' 4 * k ' V ,iu { ’ y- ' o « x o n t ^ v\ " 1 4 4 

C° / C ^v i A* ^>/^% ° 0 ^ 

'. ^ v* .- -Y" ■ -;, Y *i>0 i 

k°°y 

x V , ,. - > A- c *>. * 1 

* 0 N 0 ’ ^ 

V 7‘"/ > a> . s 4 

^ Ci * 


^ \J *> 

A ^ *•. 



v0 c 


0 v'V;*«y. "> J*y^% 



t A * ' 


V. _‘\ kk I^Vkv. 

J • - ^ 


s'- 4 . V 



« v 1 8 < o 

yj , 1 

,-0 v t° 




, 0 - * r // C‘ 



» *rV a «> * % 

A° oNf \\' N .,, ^ y o,^ 4 C 0 NC.^ /// «*' S < A /V v I 

>V:;, % ^ <*V °o 1 *, + ^ *v,,.. 

i>*V^ o° 

A*’ " 

* oV 

s J>\ '5, ■ y o « k ^ 

*o. 



























Distress of Nations. 


AN ADDRESS 


DELIVERFD AT 


THE ADAMS COUNTY INSTITUTE OF TEACHERS, 
AT GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA, 

ON 


THANKSGIVING DAY, 

November 29th, 1894, 


BY 


/ 

JAMES M. BECK, 

il 

Op the Philadelphia Bah. 


OF CO HQ, 

WASHT* C ' 


PHILADELPHIA: 

Press of George H. Buchanan and Company. 
1895 - 













The “Distress of Nations.” 


An Address Delivered before the Adams County 
Teachers’ Institute, at Gettysburg, Penna., on 

THANKSGIVING DAY, 

November 29th, 1S94. 


Ladies and Gentlemen : 

Time, place and audience alike suggest my theme. Upon 
Thanksgiving Day, when our countrymen attest their faith in 
the essential unity of humanity by joining without regard to 
differences in creed in a common ascription of praise to Him, 
whom our Norse ancestry so beautifully named the All- 
Father, in this presence of teachers, to whom is delegated 
that responsible function of the State, the education of its 
children, and in this place, where our nation had its new birth 
of freedom, and whose soil is hallowed by a nation’s tears, 
we can appropriately meditate upon that wondrous and 
ghastly phenomenon of human life, which found its awful 
expression upon this peaceful plain thirty-one years ago, and 
which here, as elsewhere, and through all the ages, has been 
the supreme agony and travail of humanity, whereof great 
men and deeds are born. 

The theme is old as the world, continuous as its 
history, and as vital to-day and pressing for decision, as 
when the Infinite Source of life sternly said to the first of the 
generations of man, “ Cain, Cain, where is thy brother ? ” 
Although nearly nineteen centuries have passed since His 
coming, whom the suffrages of uncounted millions have given 




the exalted title Prince of Peace, yet “peace on earth seems 
still as insubstantial as a rainbow,—of promise, perhaps, but 
still a rainbow,—formed by the ever brightening rays of justice 
shining through the tears of human pity. Indeed, the Gieat 
Teacher foresaw that “ wars and rumors of wars ” would 
trouble men long after His coming, and He distinctly said that 
“ such things must needs be, for nation shall rise against 
nation and kingdom against kingdom,’ and with prophetic 
vision He foresaw the armies of Titus surrounding with their 
trenches the walls of Jerusalem. He foretold “ upon the eaith 
the distress of nations. * * * Men’s hearts failing them fot 
fear.” His words have been fulfilled to the letter, and the history 
of the intervening centuries has been written in blood. The 
triumphal car of civilization has been a war chariot, rolling 
like that of Juggernaut over the innumerable necks of the 
slain. Down the vista of the centuries forever marches that 
ghostly army, of which the Abbe Perreyvc wrote : Unseen 
by the corporal eyes, but too clearly visible to the mind s eye. 

* * The great army of the dead, the army of the slain, 

the abandoned, the forgotten, the army of cruel tortures and 
prolonged infirmities, which pursues its fatal march behind 
what we call glory. ' Did not the earth with its beneficent files 
consume the bodies of the dead, they would in an appalling de¬ 
gree cumber the ground, whose number the highest calculus is 
as little able to estimate as to count the stars in the milky-way ; 
but as nature destroys the dead leaves of autumn, so she merci¬ 
fully removes the dread debris of war; else, if its sounds of 
lamentation and direful sights did not cease, no circle in the 
Inferno would be comparable in horror to this blood-stained 
earth. Rarely, perhaps never, in nineteen hundred years, 
has the temple of Janus been closed. Our own cen¬ 
tury, commencing with the thunder of Napoleon’s cannon 
on the plains of Marengo, and drawing to its close with 
similar reverberations from both the Orient and Occident, 
has not known a single year of peace. Since 1800, Pngland 
has had fifty-four wars, France forty-two, Russia twenty-three, 
Austria fourteen, Prussia nine—one hundred and forty-two 
wars by five nations, with at least four of whom the gospel 


4 


of Christ is a State religion. As Ruskin well said, “ Bedlam 
would be comic, perhaps, if there were only one madman in 
it, but when the whole world turns clown and paints itself 
red with its own heart’s blood instead of vermilion, it is 
something else than comic.” 

What is infinitely stranger still, the horrors of war, far 
from lessening with the progress of the centuries, seem only 
to increase in their frightful intensity. While its code is far 
more humane and enlightened in the nineteenth than in the 
first century, yet modern science and organization have so 
augmented its horrors that the conflicts of the first century 
compare with those of our own in destruction, as a Roman 
battle-axe with a Krupp cannon. At the dawn of the Christian 
era, the standing army of the Roman Empire, according to 
Gibbon, numbered about four hundred thousand men, and was 
scattered over a vast extent of territory, from the Euphrates 
to the Thames. To-day the standing armies of Europe 
exceed four millions, while the reserves, who have served two 
or more years in the barracks, and are trained soldiers, exceed 
sixteen millions, a number whose dimensions the mind can 

v 

neither appreciate nor imagine. With one-tenth of all able- 
bodied men on the Continent in arms in times of peace, and 
one-fifth of its women doing the laborious, and at times 
loathsome, work of man in the shop and field, one can sadly 
say with Burke, “ The age of chivalry has gone. * * * 

The glory of Europe has departed.” In the last twenty years 
these armies have been nearly doubled, and the national debts 
of the European nations, mainly incurred for war purposes, 
and wrung from the sweat of the people, have reached the 
inconceivable total of twenty-three thousand millions of dol¬ 
lars. If one is to measure the interests of man by his expendi¬ 
tures, then assuredly the supreme passion of civilized Europe 
in this evening of the nineteenth century is war, for one-third 
of all the revenues that are drained from labor and capital 
is devoted to paying merely the interest on the cost of 
past wars, one-third for preparations for future wars, and 
the remaining third to all other objects whatsoever. The size 
of individual armies has also shown a wonderful augmenta- 


5 


tion. Thus, the army which Alexander led throughout the *" . 
world, until halted in his conquests by the margin of the 
sea, numbered but forty thousand. The “grand army’’ of the 
great Napoleon, which was then supposed to have reached 
the maximum of human capacity, numbered about seven 
hundred thousand, and represented many months of prepara¬ 
tion. So wonderfully have the telegraph and railroad changed 
the conditions of war, that the Emperor William, by touching 
an electric button, could put within a fortnight more men upon 
the banks of the Rhine than those with which Napoleon 
crossed the Niemen. In the autumn manoeuvres France and 
Germany have each repeatedly mobilized more men within 
forty-eight hours for mere parade, than almost any of the 
armies of the modern Caesar. 

The conditions of war have likewise radically changed. 
Night will no longer throw its sable mantle of mercy over 
the dying and the dead, for by the light of powerful search¬ 
lights, future battles will continue to be fought. As if the 
earth’s surface were all too small for such conflicts, the heavens 
above and the waters under the earth will be made battle 

4 

grounds in the future struggles of nations, for submarine 
torpedoes have been constructed which almost realize the 
fiction of Jules Verne, and with balloons as a necessary 
equipment of modern armies, and the possibility in the near 
future of dirigible air-ships, the dream of Tennyson may but 
too soon come to pass, and we will hear : 

“The heavens filled with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew, 

From the nations’ airy navies, grappling in the central blue.” 

The spear, the lance, the sword, and the battle-axe have 
been put aside by modern man as the playthings of his child¬ 
hood. We have in their stead the army rifle, which can 
be fired ten times without reloading and can kill at three miles, 
and whose long, nickel-plated bullet can destroy three men in 
its course before its work of destruction is stayed. Driven as 
it is by smokeless powder, it will add to past horrors by blast¬ 
ing a soldier as with an invisible bolt of lightning. Its effect¬ 
iveness has practically destroyed the use in battle of the cav¬ 
alry. The day of splendid charges like that of Balaklava is 


G 


past, and Pickett’s men, if they had to repeat to-day their 
wondrous charge, would be annihilated before they could cross 
the Emmitsburg road. The destructive effects of the modern 
ride almost surpass belief. Experiments have shown that it 
will reduce muscles to a pulp, and grind the bone to powder. 

A limb struck by it is mangled beyond repair and a shot in 
the head or chest is inevitably fatal. The machine gun of 
to-day can fire eighteen hundred and sixty shots a minute, or 
thirty a second, a stream so continuous that it seems like one 
^continuous line of lead, and whose horrible noise is like a 
Satanic song. A weapon of Titans^ is the modern twelve-inch 
cannon, which can throw a projectile eight miles, and pene¬ 
trate eighteen inches of steel, even when the latter is Harvey- 
ized, a process by which the hard surface of the steel is car¬ 
bonized so that the finest drill cannot affect it. Of the present 
navies with their so-called “ commerce destroyers,” nothing 
need be said. Single ships cost four million dollars to 
build and, armed with steel plates eighteen inches thick, 
can travel through water with their engines of eleven 
thousand horse power at a rate of twenty-four miles an hour. 
One such vessel could have scattered the combined Spanish, 
French and English fleets, numbering over one hundred 
ships, at Trafalgar, like a flock of pigeons, or put the 
Spanish Armada to flight like a hawk in a dove-cote, and 
yet in the unceasing warfare of arms and armament these 
leviathans of the deep have been instantaneously destroyed? 
as with a blast of lightning, by a single dynamite torpedo. 

If these preparations for war, which cover our waters and 
darken our lands, mean anything, they indicate that civilized 
man is on the verge of a vast cataclysm, of which he is appar- * 
ently as unconscious as were the people of Pompeii, on the 
last fatal day of their city’s life, when they witnessed with 
indifference the ominous smoke curl from the crater’s mouth. 
Impossible? Who would have predicted one hundred years 
ago that Europe was about to be desolated by a twenty years 
war, which would involve every nation and recast her map ? 
Of all the follies of which man is guilty, the most fatuous is 
his assumption that what has happened before will not again. 


7 


On the contrary, the past teaches us to expect the endless 
repetitions of history. There is to-day additional leason for 
such anticipation. Our age has sown as none othei the 
dragon’s teeth of standing armies, and the human grain is ripe 
unto the harvest of blood. It needs but an incendiary like 
Napoleon to set the world on fire. Perhaps he now exists 
among us, an unrecognized subaltern, possessed of the granite- 
coated soul of Napoleon, who will, as did the Corsican incen¬ 
diary, apply the torch. To deny that such is the evident 
tendency of these unprecedented preparations is to believe that 
we can sow thistles and reap figs, or expect perennial sunshine 
where we have sown the whirlwind. The war between China 
and Japan, only fought with in part modern weapons, and with 
men who but imperfectly understood their use, in no way 
illustrates the possibilities of the future conflict. The great¬ 
est of all war correspondents, Archibald Porbes, has recently 
said: “It is virtually impossible for any one to have accu¬ 
rately pictured to himself the scene in its fullness which the 
next great battle will present to a bewildered and shuddering 
world; we know the elements that will constitute its horrors, 
but we know them only as it were academically. Men have 
yet to be thrilled by the weirdness of wholesale death, inflicted 
by missiles poured from weapons, the whereabouts of which 
cannot be ascertained because of the absence of powder 
smoke.” He concludes : “ Death incalculable may rain down 
as from the very heavens themselves.” When we recall that 
in one of the battles around Metz the use of the mitrailleuse 
struck down 6000 Germans in ten minutes, and that at Plevna, 
in 1877, Skobeleff lost in a short rush of a few hundred yards 
. 3000 men, and remember that the mitrailleuse and needle gun 
have been since quintupled in their capacity for destruction, 
the prospect is one at which the mind stands aghast and the 
heart sickens. Suffice it to say that the great strategists of 
Europe believe that the future mortality of battles will be so 
great that it will be impossible to care for the wounded or 
bury the dead, and many of them will carry as a necessary 
part of military equipment a moving crematorium to burn 
those who have fallen in battle, thus returning, after two thou- 


8 


sand years, to the custom of our Norse ancestry, without, 
however, its religious significance or symbolic beauty. 

You may suggest that this dreadful visitation will pass 
over peaceful America, as the angel that slew the first-born 
of Egypt spared the blood-splashed portals of the Israelites. 
God grant that it prove so ! Whence, however, is our assur¬ 
ance? So wonderfully have steam and electricity united men 
in a community of thought, interest and purpose, that it is 
possible that if a great Continental war should come, in which 
England would almost necessarily become involved, before it 
would be ended, the civilized world might be lapped in uni¬ 
versal flame, such as that with which the glories of Valhalla 
passed away, and the Ragnarok, or “ twilight of the Gods ” 
began. Apart from this, upon the world’s horizon is now 
discernible a cloud, at present no bigger than a man’s hand, 
but which may some day overcast the heavens. In the Orient 
are two nations, China and Japan, whose combined population 
reaches the amazing total of five hundred millions. Hitherto 
these swarming ant-hills have been ignorant of the art of war, 
for it is strangely true that the only two countries, which 
since the birth of Christ have experienced in their isolation 
comparative “ peace on earth”, are these once hermit nations 
upon whom the light of Christianity had never shone. But 
thirty years ago a mere handful of Englishmen and Frenchmen 
forced their way, at the point of the bayonet, to Pekin. All 
this is changed. Western civilization has brought to the 
Orient Bibles,—and bullets, mitres,—and mitrailleux, Godli¬ 
ness,—and Gatling guns, crosses,—and Krupp cannon, St. 
Peter,—and saltpetre, and the Orient may some day say with 
Shylock : “ The villainy you teach me I will execute and it 
will go hard, but I will better the instruction.” Already 
they have learned the lesson so well as to play with deadly 
effect the awful diapason of the cannonade. Let once the 
passion for war, which distinguishes the Occident, awaken the 
opulent Orient from its sleep of centuries, and who shall say 
that another Ghengis Khan, with a barbaric horde of millions 
at his back, may not fall upon Europe with .the crushing 
weight of an avalanche ? 


0 


It may be argued, however, that these preparations mean 
nothing and are the guarantees of peace, rather than provoca¬ 
tive of war, and that the very effectiveness of modern weapons 
makes war improbable. While apparently there is force in 
this suggestion, yet practically it is contradicted by the facts, 
for the nations that have the least armies have the most peace, 
and those that have the largest forces tremble on the verge of 
the abyss. Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Sweden and 
the United States live in substantial amity with the world, while 
France, Russia, Germany, Austria and Italy, armed to the 
teeth and staggering under their equipments, are forever 
scowling at each other across their frontiers. In them is 
found the vast magazine of martial spirit and international 
hatred, whose explosion requires but the spark of some 
trivial incident. Thus when the Empress Augusta recently 
visited Paris for pleasure her presence alarmed the world, 
caused prices to fall upon the bourses and exchanges and hur¬ 
ried an earnest and nervous consultation of all European 
cabinets. A single insult offered to her by the most irre¬ 
sponsible Parisian would have caused her son, the young 
Emperor, to draw his sword. It was thus in the power of the 
idlest street gamin to have shaken the equilibrium of the 
world. How else shall we account for the intense anxiety 
with which the sickness of the late Czar has been watched by 
thinking men throughout the world ? It was because of the 
belief that he held in his hand its peace. What a frightful 
commentary upon civilization that the prosperity, and even 
lives of innumerable millions of our fellow-beings, may depend 
upon the pacific sentiments of a single man ! 

No fact can be more clear than that humanity is at the 
parting of the ways. The'maximum of preparation has been 
reached. In Europe men can arm no further. Italy has 
already fallen under the burden of bankruptcy thereby occa¬ 
sioned, and may be at any day plunged into the vortex of 
revolution. Many thoughtful publicists believe that the 
European nations must therefore either fight or disarm. Well 
did the Master predict: “ Upon the earth distress of nations 
with perplexity. * * * Men’s hearts failing them for fear 


10 


and for looking after those things, which are coining on the 
earth.” 

Let us consider this phenomenon of war. Considered 
abstractly, in the light of absolute rather than relative truth, 
it is more than an evil—it is an indecency. It breaks the com¬ 
mandment, “ Thou shalt not kill,” and it contradicts the beat¬ 
itude, “ Blessed are the peacemakers!” It is a Pandora’s box. 
from which arise whatsoever things are cruel, whatsoever 
things are false, whatsoever things are unclean, whatsoever 
things are of ill-repute ; if there be either vice or wickedness 
in them, war illustrates and magnifies them all. It substitutes 
despotism for liberty, revenge for forgiveness, might for right, 
cruelty for mercy, force for reason, destruction for creation. It 
is not only of the earth, earthy, it is truly of hell, hellish. Lest 
I be accused of exaggeration let me quote,eminent military 
authorities. Said the Iron Duke, writing from the field of 
Waterloo: “ There is nothing more horrible than victory, 
except defeat.” Said Sherman to some military men who 
were praising a martial career: “ You think that war is all 
glory ; I tell you it is all hell.” 

It does not, however, follow that all those who engage in 
it are unworthy of admiration, or that it is not at times, rela¬ 
tively to existing conditions, even right. If I am assailed 
upon the street by a noted desperado, or see a weaker and 
innocent party thus assailed, and I interfere, the street brawl 
is disgraceful, and abstractly evil, but my act in defending my 
life, or that of another, is wholly courageous and admirable. 
A nation has the same right to defend its life and rights, or 
(not to put it on a purely selfish basis) the lives and rights of 
others, as has an individual, and, when wantonly attacked, 
force must be repelled by force. In such emergencies the 
men who leave their wives and children and bare their breasts 
to the leaden hail are godlike heroes, whose praise it is impos¬ 
sible to exaggerate. In laying down their lives for their 
fellow-men, or in being willing to do so (for the “ readiness 
is all ”), they make themselves not unworthy disciples of the 
great Martyr. The love of peace is not inconsistent with the 
instinct of self-preservation. Where the alternative is war or 


11 


dishonor the former becomes righteous. “A just war,” says 
the late President Woolsey, of Yale College, in his “ Intro¬ 
duction to the Study of International Law,” “ is one that is 
waged in the last resort, when peaceful means have failed to 
procure redress, or when self-defense calls for it.” 

With this saving qualification, no fact can be clearer than 
that of all the follies and sins of which mankind has been 
guilty, war to determine differences of opinion is the most 
absurd and iniquitous, at the bar of the conscience or the 
greater bar of God. Its purpose, if any, is to determine dis¬ 
putes of fact or law between sovereign nations. It places 
limits to human reason and constitutes force as the ultima 
ratio. It perpetuates between nations the almost obsolete 
duel between individuals, with the difference that when gen¬ 
tlemen fought on the so-called field of honor the victor never 
stooped to strip the vanquished of his purse and watch ; yet 
the nation, which compels another by “ blood and iron ” to 
surrender its views for the time being of the mooted question, 
takes from the vanquished as much money and property as 
the by-standing nations will permit. “ Vae victis ” is ever 
the cry, and the ethics of Christian nations are those of the 
highwayman. 

I affirm generally, and I should admit of but few excep¬ 
tions : 

1. That the causes of war have rarely been proportionate 
to their consequences. 

2. The arbitrament of arms has rarely decided the ques¬ 
tion at issue. 

3. That even if it had, it has rarely decided anything that 
could not at infinitely less expense of life and property, and 
to the greater satisfaction and honor of both contending 
nations, been adjusted otherwise. 

History cannot but impress us with the disproportion 
which the causes of war bear to their consequences. The 
caprice of a woman, the ambition of a prince, the personal 
quarrel of two individuals who wear crowns, and like trivial 
reasons have caused a considerable portion of international 
quarrels. Young Hamlet correctly described the temper of 


12 


nations, when he commented upon the soldiers of young 
Prince Fortinbras: 

« “ That for a fantasy and trick of fame, 

Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot 
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, 

Which is not tomb enough and continent 
To hide the slain." 

Take for example the last great war between P'rance and 
Germany, and see about what a straw these two highly civil¬ 
ized peoples quarreled. The throne of Spain became vacant, 
and the Spanish people, through their representatives, selected 
as a candidate for the succession the young Prince Leopold 
of Hohenzollern. According to any rational rule of inter¬ 
national ethics the one nation to be consulted was the nation 
to be governed—Spain. At once, however, all France was 
in a state of ferment, and was prepared to go to war, and if 
need be, sacrifice a million lives, to keep the young princeling 
from ascending a foreign throne. In the interests of peace, and 
mainly through the kind offices of England, the King of 
Prussia forbade young Leopold to be a candidate, and he 
withdrew. Here the incident should have ended, but France 
was inflamed with the lust for war. Its people crowded the 
boulevards on the beautiful summer nights of 1870, crying, 
as if possessed with the spirit that drove the Gadarene swine 
to their own destruction, “ a Berlin ! a Berlin ! ” To gratify 
this national pride, and partly to uphold a falling dynasty, 
the ambassador of France was instructed by his government 
to call upon the King of Prussia and make the absurd and 
offensive demand that the latter give his assurance that at 
no future time would he give his assent to the candidacy of 
Prince Leopold for the Spanish succession. When the ambas¬ 
sador called, the Prussian King, who was taking the waters 
at Ems, was unable to see hiyi. Bismarck, however, as he 
himself admits, so worded the public telegraphic intelligence 
of this fact that the accidental inability of the King to see 
Benedetti appeared as a studied insult to P'rance. Even had 
this been so, France needed only to protest against this dis¬ 
courtesy at the great bar of public opinion to have received 


13 


its justification. The noble ethics of war are here illustrated, 
in that Bismarck did this, as he tells us, to precipitate a war 
when, as he knew, Germany was ready and France unprepared. 
Such is the chivalry of nations! The result was a war, in 
which the loss of life and property and the injury to civilization 
are simply incalculable, and whose end is not yet. Puck was 
right : “What fools these mortals be ! ” 

Even if the consequences of a resort to arms were pro¬ 
portionate to the questions involved, the justification for the 
arbitrament of the sword utterly ceases when we reflect that 
wars cannot decide any question of law or fact. They may, 
indeed, decide a question of temporary physical possession, but 
never any underlying principle or right. Might never makes 
right; neither man nor nation is ever convinced as to its 
error by being knocked down. The world should have learned 
by this time that bullets are as powerless to convince as the 
stake, the fagot, the thumbscrew and the axe. I am not 
unaware that there have been wars that have apparently been 
decisive of the questions involved, but this was because the 
adjustment sought to be achieved has subsequently com¬ 
mended itself to the reason or necessities of the conquered, 
and has therefore received its acquiescence. An apt illustra¬ 
tion of this truth is shown in our own war of 1812. England 
claimed the right to impress seamen on the high seas from 
vessels of the United States. This claim of right we most 
justly denied, curiously enough upon the very ground of the 
freedom of the sea as a common pathway of nations, which 
England invoked and we denied in the matter of the seal 
fisheries. We invoked the arbitrament of the sword to vindi¬ 
cate that right, and before the war had ended our commerce 
was driven from the seas, the resources of our land drained 
by taxation and our National Capital captured and in part 
burned. When better and mor^e peaceful conditions prevailed, 
our commissioners were instructed to treat for peace upon any 
terms consistent with a “ satisfactory stipulation against im¬ 
pressment.” The instructions ended significantly: “If this 
encroachment of Great Britain is not conceded, the United 
States have appealed to arms in vain.” The English govern- 


14 


meat, however, while it had sustained the worst reverses, was 
in the position of the philosopher of Hudibras, who, though 
“ convinced against his will was of the same opinion still.” 
Failing to get a decision upon the very point involved in 
the quarrel our commissioners were instructed “ to omit 
any stipulation on the subject of impressment.” Peace was 
therefore concluded with the very point, which had cost a 
relatively immense loss of life and property, undecided. Sub¬ 
sequently, England was convinced by other than coercive 
measures that its position was wrong, and the point is no 
longer in dispute. Our only advantageous result, therefore, 
of a most destructive war was the opportunity to boast with 
Southey’s dull, plodding peasant (true type of humanity !) “ It 
was a famous victory.” 

An even better illustration is the annexation of the Rhine 
provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. Two centuries ago, by the 
peace of Westphalia the former was ceded by Germany to 
France, and later Lorraine became French by peaceful acqui¬ 
sition. Both became so completely Gallicized prior to 1871, 
that Germany has after nearly twenty-five years of reposses¬ 
sion, failed to reconcile their inhabitants. When France lay 
prostrate under the heel of the conqueror, and Germany, 
through the man of “ blood and iron,” demanded the cession 
of these provinces and the payment of one thousand million 
dollars, the conquered upon compulsion and through 
necessity yielded, but already the distinct warning was 
uttered that such enforced cession would never receive a 
lasting acquiesence. The consequence has been that after 
twenty-four years the labor of Germany has been drained 
by excessive taxation to support the mighty armies 
necessary to retain these provinces. The spires of Metz 
and Strasbourg are the danger signals of Europe. It is safe 
to say that Germany has spent, in the last twenty years, 
more than the value of the provinces and the great indemnity 
to retain both. France will never acquiesce in the decision. 
The war of revenge is taught to the very school children. 
Yearly the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de La Concorde 
is draped in black as a protest against this spoliation of terri- 


15 


tory. Sooner or later these wretched provinces, as if charged 
with the curse of God, must become not merely the cause but 
the battle ground of a yet more bloody and expensive war. 
The thousand million dollars in gold, wrung by Germany 
from France in its hour of surrender, and paid by the French 
people with a self-sacrifice unparalleled, will yet curse both 
conqueror and conquered, even as the Rheingold of German 
legend, ravished by the gnomes and welded into the ring, 
cursed all w r ho possessed it. 

In any event, war decides nothing that could not at 
infinitely less expense be better adjusted by the peaceful 
methods of arbitration in an international court. The value 
of this method is now too well ascertained to be questioned. 
It has shown its ability during the present century to adjust 
over seventy-five disputes; of these twenty-five related to 
claims for damages to citizens of one country while in the 
offending county ; in sixteen, disputed boundaries were ami¬ 
cably adjusted, and in five the yet more difficult questions of 
disputed acquisitions of new territory were peacefully decided ; 
in some of these the national honor and historical prestige 
were believed to be involved, and found entirely capable of 
amicable adjustment. Such, for example, as the Luxemburg 
affair of 1867, and the Alabama claims of 1871. The incal¬ 
culable gain to humanity of this rational method can be seen 
in the single statement that in the wars of the nineteenth cen¬ 
tury fifteen thousand million dollars have been spent and five 
millions of lives destroyed. Apart from the matter of mere 
cost, the rational method has the advantage over force, in that 
the decision is acquiesced in, involves no loss of honor, occa¬ 
sions no harsh feelings and further, is not dependent upon 
chance. The absurdity of the appeal to thb god of battles in 
matters of opinion, lies in the fact that victory in many of the 
most decisive engagements has been won by chance. Thus 
the open road at Waterloo, the mistake of the guide, the fall¬ 
ing of the rain the night before, which prevented the bringing 
up of the cannon, all disconcerted and brought to nought at 
Waterloo the best laid plans of the greatest strategist of all 
time. His very physical ailments contributed to the result. 


16 


An attack of indigestion at Leipsic is said to have altered the 
course of that battle of nations, while it is well known that 
at Waterloo Napoleon was suffering intense physical pain, 
which may have caused the mind to suffer with the body. 
Even disregarding the elements of chance, modern machine 
war is largely a question of numbers and equipment. Napo¬ 
leon said that “ the god of battles was always on the side of 
the heaviest battalions.” The ethics of the rifle and the con¬ 
science of the cannon is simply the primal rule of brute 
strength, the gospel of Rob Roy: 

“ Let him take that has the power, 

Let him keep that can.” 

In the peaceful arbitrament of an international' court, 
however, the questions are decided not by the chance of a 
moment, nor by the relative strength of the nations, but in the 
calm light of reason and by the eternal standards of justice. 
The value of such a court, not merely in deciding the question 
but in promoting international good-will, is shown in the Ala¬ 
bama claims, when, for the first time, such a court was estab¬ 
lished. These claims had been a fruitful and long-continued 
source of irritation between two highly civilized countries. 
England could not pay under threat of war for fear of 
humiliation; the United States could neither abandon nor 
modify the claim except with a like result. A war, therefore, 
whose consequences would have been incalculable, seemed 
inevitable; in a happy moment, however, after much negotia¬ 
tion, both nations agreed to refer the question to an interna¬ 
tional court. The constitution and decision of that court is a 
milestone in the history of the human race. Never before 
was seen the sublime spectacle of two sovereign nations, 
perhaps the mightiest in the world, appearing in the persons 
of their counsel, and calmly, soberly, and dispassionately 
arguing the questions according to right and justice. The 
decision in favor of the United States was acquiesced in by 
England, and the improvement of our relations with our 
mother country dates from this epoch-making arbitration. 

The limitations of arbitration and, under present condi¬ 
tions of thought, the obstacles to the abolition of war remain 


17 


to be considered. That these exist only the most short¬ 
sighted and enthusiastic doctrinaire can deny. Time will 
forbid any but a brief discussion of them. 

It is obvious, for example, that this remedy has no 
efficacy in cases of civil war. For our own Government, for 
instance, to have arbitrated the question of secession with the 
Southern Confederacy would have been a fatal compromise, 
nay, surrender of the #ery point in dispute, namely, the sov¬ 
ereignty of the Federal Government. Again, some wars are 
an act of justice and expiation, which the generation which 
suffers them neither occasions nor can prevent. Such was our 
civil war. Its causes came from other centuries than our 
own. 'An immedicable vulnus , it had its origin in the world- 
old evil of slavery. Had but one babe been torn from the 
breast of its slave-mother and sold under the hammer, expia¬ 
tion was necessary. God abhors injustice, as nature a vacuum, 
and the civil war was a stupendous fatality. Our prophet- 
president, Abraham Lincoln, clearly saw this truth when he 
spake in majestic phrase on the occasion of his second 
inauguration: 

“ The Almighty has his own purposes. * Woe unto the world 
because of offences, for it must needs be that offences come ; but 
woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.’ If we shall suppose 
that American slavery is one of these offences which, in the provi¬ 
dence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued 
through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He 
gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to 
those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any 
departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living 
God always ascribe to him ? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we 
pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, 
if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bond¬ 
man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, 
and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by 
another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years 
ago, so still it must be said, ‘ The judgments of the Lord are true 
and righteous altogether ? ’ ” 

Wars frequently result from the hatreds of different races, 
the baneful heritage of centuries, and from vast conflicts of 
national interests, which, by reason of their very magnitude, are 


18 


not susceptible of arbitration. Of the one class, the hatred 
between the Slav and the Teuton, of the other the desire of 
Russia to obtain at Constantinople a harbor for its commerce, 
that cannot be closed by the icy hand of Winter, are illustra¬ 
tions. The great historic movements of races, slow and re¬ 
sistless as glaciers, could as little be checked by international 
agreement, as the people of Chamouni could stay the onward 
course of the mer de glace. 

But the great limitation to the efficacy of arbitration lies 
in the moral nature of man. When one of two contending 
parties does not desire to be just or respect the rights of 
others, arbitration is impossible, and on the part of those 
whose rights are wantonly invaded, war is simply the primal 
instinct of self-preservation. -In the present conditions of 
thought not every peace is preferable to war. There can be 
peace with dishonor, and multiplied death is better than mul¬ 
tiplied disgrace. Agreements to arbitrate or attempts to adjust 
differences, are only practicable where an honest difference of 
opinion exists, and each contending party desires to be just. 
Thus between the highwayman, who wantonly assaults me, 
and myself, there is no difference of opinion. We cannot 
arbitrate the question whether he shall rob or murder me. 
He resorts to force, and for me none other remains. 
This is equally true of nations. If one seeks to rob, pillage or 
destroy the other, there exists no question of opinion either of 
fact or law that is referable to reason or determinable by either 
discussion or arbitration. The appeal to arms is the ultima 
ratio. It must be clearly remembered in every discussion 
as to the efficacy of arbitration, that it is only applicable to 
differences of opinion. In such case I have absolute faith in 
the willingness to arbitrate as a means of attaining peace. The 
spirit of conciliation, rather than the written agreement, 
is all important. If nations desire war, such agreement 
will be as ineffectual to keep them from conflict as strands 
of rotten silk. The remedy must therefore ever be an appeal 
to the conscience of mankind. The “ decent respect to 
the opinions of mankind,” of which Jefferson spoke in the 
great Declaration, must be invoked, but until such public 


19 


opinion is educated to hate war and love justice, perpetual 
peace will be as Von Moltke said, only “ a dream,” however 
much arbitration may narrow the occasions or destroy the 
justification of war. 

Herein lies the great difficulty, for the profound, under¬ 
lying cause of war and the chief obstacle to perpetual 
peace, at present seemingly insuperable, is the real love of 
man for war, not as a means but as an end. No one who 
has studied the human heart and considered this great 
problem philosophically can dispute the fact that in man is an 
innate and over-powering love of contest, the result of heredity 
and education. It is shown in our laws, literature, language 
and art. We are sprung from nations to whom fighti ng was 
a supreme passion, and this desire has passed as an heirloom 
from generation to generation. 

“ On helm and harness rings the Saxon hammer, 

Through Cimbric forest roars the Norseman’s song, 

And loud, amid the universal clamor, 

O’er distant deserts sounds the Tartar gong. 

I hear the Florentine, who from his palace 
Wheels out his battle-bell with dreadful din, 

And Aztec priests upon their teocallis 

Beat the wild war-drums made of serpent’s skin.” 

Especially is this true of us who owe our origin to the 
hardy Norsemen. The world has known no greater warriors 
The Greeks fought for an object, to defend their country from 
invasion or to avenge their affronted honor; the Romans 
for power and the enlargement of their domains; the 
followers of Mohammed, to propagate their religious faith. 
The Vikings on the contrary, fought for the mere love of 
fighting. 1 ribe warred with tribe, village with village, 
house with house. War was the Norseman’s “ shield -play ” 
and “ sword -game." These traits of national character are 
clearly reflected in their religious faiths, which always rep¬ 
resent the matured philosophy of a people. Thus the para¬ 
dise of the Greek and Roman, as well as that of Mohammed, 
was a sensual one, in which the physical charms of women 
constituted the chief happiness of the faithful. The Valhalla, 


20 


or heaven of our Norse ancestry, however, represented 
fighting as the reward of the blest. While Valkyries did 
carry from the battle-field the slain heroes to Valhalla, 
their only further mission was to serve them with the 
mead that gave them immortal life. The happiness of the 
warriors consisted in fighting between themselves all day, 
and joining in the convivial cup by night. In proof of this, 
listen to the description of Valhalla as given in the latter 
Edda : 

4 “ Then Gangleri said: ‘ A great many men are there in Valhalla. 

Surely Odin is a very great chief, as he rules over such a host. What is 
the entertainment of the Einharjar when they are not drinking ?’ Har 
answered: ‘ Every day after having dressed, they put on their war 
clothes and go out into the enclosure, and fight and slay each other. 
This is their game ; near daybreak they ride home to Valhalla and sat 
down to drink.’ ” 

From generation to generation this remarkable trait of 
human character has descended, and it is almost, if not quite, 
as dominant in life as when Siegfried forged the magic 
sword. It is reflected in the very character of our sports. 
The games which appeal to our race are those in which 
there exists the greatest danger, and which call forth the 
greatest qualities of muscle and heart. Bull fighting in 
Spain, student duelling in German universities, fencing in 
France, and foot-ball in England and America, are the sports 
which by reason of their inherent danger appeal most strongly 
to the popular tastes. A few hundred will see a great chess 
match, a few thousand hear a Beethoven symphony, or a per¬ 
formance of Hamlet by a finished actor, ten thousand will 
crowd the gates to see a base-ball match, but when twenty- 
two young collegians engage in the most brutal of all sports, 
foot-ball, the attendance will exhaust the capacity of the 
grounds. Twenty thousand people recently witnessed a con¬ 
test between the universities of Yale and Princeton, which, 
though presumably played by gentlemen, was supervised by 
the Chief of Police to prevent a breach of peace, in which the 
spectators beheld without either distaste or pity, twelve men 
injured, of whom six were so disabled as to retire from the 


21 


game. Barbarians are we all, with thinnest veneering of civili¬ 
zation. How little human nature has changed in nearly 
twenty centuries ! I do not question that among the eighty 
thousand people, which thronged the Circus Maximus, and 
watched the gladiators butcher each other for the entertain¬ 
ment of the Roman people, there were good mothers like 
Volumnia, and maidens who, like Virgilia, were as “ chaste 
as the icicle that hangs on Dian’s temple.” Little children 
probably followed the sports with the same glee as that 
with which the children of our day watch at Christmas-tide 
the spectacle of harlequin knocking down the clown and 
pantaloon in the pantomime. They probably thought little 
of it, so absolutely are the human mind and heart ruled 
by conventionality. If their thoughtlessness were cruelty, 
it differed only in degree from the assembled multi¬ 
tude of our own day, who at Seville witness the 
toreador’s conflict with a maddened bull; at Heidelberg, 
the attempt of two students to mutilate each other’s faces; 
or at London and New York, the absolute disregard of 
life or limb exhibited in every prominent foot-ball match. In 
the same love of contest, we can possibly explain this myster¬ 
ious Napoleonic revival, which has absorbed two continents 
for the last twelve months. The indifference with which the 
mass of mankind read of battles in another country illustrates 
the same trait of human character. How many Americans 
seriously cared twenty-five years ago, when they languidly read 
the intelligence in the morning papers of the shells dropping 
into Paris at the fate of one a minute, and its once happy peo¬ 
ple cowering in the cellars and subsisting upon rats? The 
tragedies on the greater stage of the world affect the average 
man less than the acted death of Camille on the boards 
of the theatre. Millions have shed tears over the death of 
Little Nell or Colonel Newcome ; none have been similarly 
affected in reading that in the Russian campaign of Napoleon, 
125,000 perished in battle, and 123,000 died of hunger and 
cold ; or that in the six days’ fighting about Metz over 100,000 
French and Germans were prematurely hurried to their last 
account. Indeed, humanity seems to be periodically inspired 


by the same craving for an unnatural excitement as moved 
those worn out libertines to form the suicides’ club in Stev¬ 
enson’s famous story of that name. They had exhausted the 
excitement of every usual dissipation, and as a last resort to 
stir their sluggish blood and quicken their flagging pulses, 
formed this club, in which every night the cards were dealt, 
and he who received the ace of clubs was obliged to kill him 
who received the ace of spades. Similarly that old roue, the 
world, exhausted by many thousand years of dissipation and 
wearied by the gigantic gambling in fluctuating values, called 
business, and other forms of nervous excitement, periodically 
craves the great gambling game of war, whose dice boxes are 
Krupp cannon and whose stakes are the lives of nations and 
individuals. 

If, however, the love of war be innate, it is unquestionably 
stimulated and increased by our education. From the cradle 
to the grave but one lesson is taught, and that lesson an abso¬ 
lute contradiction of the Sermon on the Mount. Among the 
first toys given to a child are mimic soldiers and cannon. 
When the boy commences his reading of history he learns lit¬ 
tle of the peaceful achievements of past races, but the sole 
story that history has to tell him is one of wars and battles, 
which are held up to him net merely as the chief occupation, 
but the highest glory of man. His first introduction to the 
classics is in Caesar’s Commentaries, where he learns how a 
warlike and powerful people made war upon a peaceful and 
semi-civilized nation, without any provocation other than the 
lust for territory or spoil, and in doing so destroyed a million 
men and sold another million into slavery. Soon he becomes 
enamoured of the subject, when he beholds it glorified by the 
rolling and immortal hexameters of Homer, and Hector’s 
courage and Achilles’ wrath become objects of entrancing 
interest; in all its tale of blood but one expression of pity, 
when Andromache parts with Hector, and seeing her child 
frightened at the nodding plumes of his father’s helmet “smiles 
through her tears.” When the boy grows to adolescence he 
cannot but perceive that woman admires nothing so much as 
shoulder straps or a pair of epaulets, and that men go to bat- 


tic, not arrayed in the black of mourning, nor amid the sad 
strains of a death march, but in gay costumes and to 
melodies that are joyous and festal in their character. He 
perceives why the church itself, to stir the blood and quicken 
the enthusiasm of her children, borrows the metaphor of the 
battlefield and in its hymnology stirringly attests its belief that 
the most inspiring analogy for life is war. It is sadly true> 
that the race reserves its highest honors, not for the thinkers, 
but for the fighters; not for those who create, but for those 
who destroy. 

The love of war, however, arises not merely from that of 
contest, but—stupendous paradox !—from the most noble and 
sublime trait of character, man’s lov£ of self-denial. The chief 
reason why the soldier will ever be a godlike hero in the eyes 
of men is that, rising above the selfish commonplaces of this 
working-day world, he is willing to give the most that he can, 
his life, for the people whom he loves, or the cause in which 
he believes. Higher than this ideal man cannot reach, for 
the spiritual leader of our race could do no more than lay 
down His life for others. It is this that assimilates every sol¬ 
dier, who falls upon the field of battle, to the great Martyr, 
and which gives infinite and unfading beauty to Thorwald- 
sen’s Lion of Lucerne. The brave Swiss guard, whose death 
it commemorates, were not inspired by patriotism, for they 
were aliens, but by simple fidelity to their cause and calling, 
“ even unto death.” The paw of the lion, resting on the Bour¬ 
bon lilies in the dark bosom of the everlasting hills, is the 
artist’s symbol of this undying truth. It is this which makes 
a field like that of Gettysburg holy ground. To countless 
thousands of men it proved a Calvary, upon which they expi¬ 
ated by their deaths the sins of others. That peach orchard, 
where a thousand men poured out the blood of their gallant 
hearts, was it not a Garden of Gethsemane in which many a 
hero felt the sweat “like unto great drops of blood?” For 
others your shell-stormed streets were a via dolorosa, which 
they trod to bloody death. Is not your Cemetery Ridge, 
with its rows of unnamed dead, a Golgotha or place of 
skulls, and the last resting place of heroes? For the 


* 


24 


soldier who is willing to give his life for the cause in which 
he believes, whether or not he is mistaken in that belief, I 
have nothing but the profoundest respect and admiration, but 
to those who needlessly cause war and refer to the arbitra¬ 
ment of arms the solution of questions which are referable to 
reason, the world will one day give its eternal execrations. 

These seem to me the limitations of international arbitra¬ 
tion as a remedy for war. Yet the hope is justified by reason, 
that as the world is ruled by public opinion, when it con¬ 
demns war as both unwise and unjust, and demands justice as 
the standard of international relations, war will finally cease. 
Despite the outward evidences of unprecedented preparation, 
it is quite clear that the conscience of the world is increas- 
ingly, although now with but a still, small voice, disapprov¬ 
ing of the arbitrament of arms. The steamship, the railroad, 
and telegraph are uniting scattered races of men in a com¬ 
munity of interest and purpose that was not possible a cen¬ 
tury ago, and producing a slow but none the less gradual 
improvement in the friendliness-of international relations. 
If, as I have before said, the movements of races, are as resist¬ 
less as glaciers by mere international agreement, yet like 
these moving masses of ices, they are finally stayed 
in their course by an invisible hand, and dissolve into 
refreshing and fructifying streams. We are ever near¬ 
ing the sublime ideal of the unity of humanity, how¬ 
ever distant we may still be from its realization. The 
superiority of love to hatred, and of reason to force, is 
strikingly shown by the fact that the improvement of these 
relations and the growing friendship of nations are arising 
not from force or mere interest, but from acts of kind¬ 
ness that appeal to the heart. Thus the American expedi¬ 
tion, led by the undaunted Kane in search of England’s hero, 
Franklin, was reciprocated when the latter country loaned to 
Lieutenant Greely her best Arctic ship to search for the sur¬ 
vivors of the Jeannette. These two events caused a warm 
stream of sympathy to flow between the two nations, which 
had been theretofore estranged. Who shall forget the thrill 
that ran through the English-speaking world, when it learned 


25 


of the frightful disaster in the harbor ot Apia to the English 
and American ships? Against a cyclonic storm, both Ameri¬ 
can and English ships bravely struggled, fighting with the 
power of their mighty engines to force their way through the 
tempest to the open sea for safety. Despite every effort, the 
ill-starred jlagship of the American squadron was slowly 
driven inch by inch upon the rocks. As slowly did the 
Calliope make headway towards safety. As the latter 
passed the former, the fated crew of the Trenton gave 
a cheer for the brave sailors of the English steamer. It was 
the salute of the vanquished to the victor, of the doomed to 
the saved, and it not only thrilled Christendom with its 
infinite moral grandeur, but inspired both countries as never 
before with the sentiment of the fraternity of man. Between 
no two nations has there been of recent years such a feeling 
of bitter animosity as between France and Germany, and 
until recently every effort for conciliation had failed; but 
within the past twelve months a kindlier feeling has resulted, 
due not to prodigious armies or imposing displays of force, 
but to the knightly courtesy of the young German Emperor. 
When the great Marshal of France, the hero of Malakofif 
and Majenta, MacMahon, was buried at the Madeleine, 
two German cuirassiers made their way through the 
murmuring crowd and laid upon the coffin a wreath from 
their Imperial Master. The heart of France was touched by 
this kindly act, a feeling which was confirmed when the same 
tactful monarch showed his sympathy with the French people 
in the loss of their great President, Carnot, by pardoning 
some French spies, who had been imprisoned for an attempt 
to serve their country. It may safely be said that the first 
friendly sentiments of the French press or people toward 
Germany in the last twenty-four years came from these two 
acts of kindness. 

May we not, then, hope that with the flight ot centuries 
the animosities ot the races will perish and that public opinion 
will condemn war as both unwise and iniquitous ? To despair 
of this would be to doubt humanity and question the 
increasing purpose which runs through the ages. The time 


26 


will come—how far distant we know not—when ballots and 
not bullets will determine the destiny of the races, when there 
will be a supreme federal compact of the world, with a legisla¬ 
ture to enact such laws as are needed for the general good of 
mankind, and with an august and sublime tribunal, at whose 
bar the sovereign nations will litigate their differences. 

“ Peace on earth and good-will to man ” is not wholly a 
dream. The storm of human passions and hatreds is abating, 
while in the skies can clearly be discerned the Row of 
Promise. Far above the discordant cries of frenzied and 
maddened nations can be heard, by those who will attune 
their souls to the symphony of universal progress, the nobler 
strains of increasing fraternity and good-will. The day will 
come, nay, unless progress shall-be brought face to face with 
a gigantic cul de sac, must come , when Caesar, or the martial 
spirit, will bow the knee to the Prince of Peace, and say, as 
did the Apostate : 


Galilean , thou hast conquered! ” 




The 

Distress of Nations 


AN ADDRESS 


DELIVERED AT 

THE ADAMS COUNTY INSTITUTE OF TEACHERS, 
AT GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA, 


THANKSGIVING DAY, 

November 29th, 1894, 


JAMES M. BECK, 

Of the Philadelphia Bar. 


PHILADELPHIA: 

Press of George H. Buchanan and Company. 
1895- 






















r* ^ - _ 


' ,VH ( % '° 9K 'J ,«***\ 
' + ' -°- v, o nb ^ 


- 

, . 0 , h- t * ,A v y „%?•**"> ^ 

•>, %lSP - ^ ^ 

: a ^ 

* V' 

* 











' « * I + N , &.. '' I , s s ^ 0 X <• ' 0 * v. * 

A N t 0 N C , ^ • 

: - „. : *b o* : /'r-:-.- J- - ^ > N • ,■' > 

\0 O. ,iuJ,/ « J ._, mLj: .Oo 


* '' < r '-■ * \ v- 

*. -•• v> S 

C P v«\? \ ^ 

^ V 


° ■ . <V 

* oV ^ 

^ * s c y ° 

f% y '.- . JpA!//^; + ^ 

•— VI 

x 0c ^. 




^ V 

' o , I ■* A \D < 


c ■• . 


“ <-*r v>' V , '/• V 


S'* 'S' 

' ^ ■* ' .' .: . 'V ^ 

* * 


* "■'■ V ^f. /■ V .', V * -rx/iiUiW - 

*.\ V'\-' •*''•>*’"• •/,,..,% .0 

fc- w .*jflifev 


./■* a' 





